Light Emitting Diodes (LEDs) capable of generating white light are projected to become the dominant source of lighting in the commercial and residential sectors in the future. LED lighting provides an opportunity to communicate visible light communications (VLC) signaling for a wide range of applications.
In many applications there is, or is expected to be, a need to decode low-rate visible light communication messages. The envisioned use cases include, e.g., indoor positioning, security for building/network access, augmented displays, mobile device pairing, etc. Specialized dedicated VLC receiver devices can be built to detect and decode VLC signals. Unfortunately, using specialized dedicated VLC receiver devices can be costly, and the specialized VLC receiver devices may not be widely distributed in the general population. It would be advantageous if new method and apparatus were developed such that commonly available devices, or slightly modified commonly available devices, e.g., smartphones, could be utilized to recover low-rate VLC communications messages and/or other information communicated via a VLC signal.